Guest Editors’ Introduction

Although Ralph Ellison said that he was born on March 1, 1914, biographers now place his date of birth exactly one year earlier.¹ In 2013 and 2014, the national media gave Ellison’s centenary only a modest amount of coverage, but academic and cultural institutions marked the occasion with conference sessions, symposia, special exhibits, and scholars began to plan commemorative publications. The year-long series of centenary events in Ellison’s hometown of Oklahoma City culminated in the Ralph Ellison Centennial Symposium, which was held in conjunction with the 2014 conference of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS). This special issue of American Studies grew out of these joint meetings.

We are very happy to reflect on “Ralph Ellison at 100” in this venue, for, in some important ways, Ellison’s life as a public intellectual was a life in American studies. He devoted much of his energy to the production, conservation, and interpretation of African American culture—“that fragment,” as he put it, “of the huge diverse American experience which I know best.”² In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Ellison contributed to the massive Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) fieldwork program that is one of the institutional origins of American studies and that yielded one of its largest and most important archives. As a writer identified with the Popular Front of the 1930s and 1940s, Ellison took part in a movement from which emerged American studies’ idea of American culture as a dynamic nexus of ethnic, regional, and class cultures shaped by an ongoing struggle for social justice.³ In 1954, Ellison served on the faculty of the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies, introducing his European students to the interdisciplinary study of US culture, especially African American culture. And, as a member of the Carnegie Commission on Educational Television (1965–67), he helped to create the institutional infrastructure for what we now recognize as public television, which has long been a major popular showcase for American studies research.

Ellison’s fictions and essays are likewise intimately bound up with American studies. To be sure, Invisible Man (1952) refuses to be mere “social science,” but the novel is nevertheless an analysis of folk culture (e.g., hot yams and Brer Rabbit), material culture (e.g., leg irons and sambo dolls), literature (e.g., “Self-Reliance” and 12 Million Black Voices), music (e.g., Louis Armstrong and the spirituals), place (e.g., the rural South and the streets of Harlem), social movements (e.g., Communism and Garveyism), social institutions (e.g., the black college and the factory), and social orders (e.g., white supremacy and patriarchy). Much the same could be said for Ellison’s collections of essays, Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986); such posthumous publications as Flying Home and Other Stories (1996) and the novel-in-progress Juneteenth (1999) / Three Days Before the Shooting... (2010); as well as other writing that remained unpublished or uncollected at the time of Ellison’s death in 1994.

Thus, as the contents of this special issue suggest, Ellison studies is also American studies. We bring together in this forum a wide variety of new Ellison scholarship, a selection of artists’ responses to his work, and some personal reflections on the author himself. Several of the scholarly essays collected here focus on Ellison’s own crossing of disciplinary boundaries. Lena M. Hill discusses Ralph and Fanny Ellison’s shared investment in visual art and shows how it informs his fictional representations of the nation’s democratic aspirations. Paul Devlin inscribes Ellison’s contemporary, Ann Petry, in the history of jazz writing by arguing that her short story “Solo on the Drums” (1947) may have figured in the development of Ellison’s “phenomenology of listening.” Kasia Boddy considers Ellison’s reckoning with sport, identifying Len Zinberg’s Popular Front novel Walk Hard–Talk Loud (1940) as one of Invisible Man’s many intertexts, Boddy examines the narratives’ portrayal of the boxing ring as a site of political education. And two of our...